Abstract
Any proof that Queen Elizabeth I might speak and read Italian, and indeed, any proof of her linguistic proficiency have inevitably been considered somewhat suspect, since extravagant praise of a monarch might touch on intellectual abilities as a matter of course. Praise bestowed by writers such as Roger Ascham, who was very close to Elizabeth and to some extent depending on her patronage, should be carefully considered:
It is your shame, (I speake to you all, you yong Ientlemen of England) that one mayd should go beyond you all, in excellencie of learning, and knowledge of diuers tonges. Pointe forth six of the best giuen Ientlemen of this Court, and all they together, shew not so much good will, spend not so much tyme, bestow not so many houres, dayly orderly, & constantly, for the increase of learning & knowledge, as doth the Queenes Maiestie her selfe. Yea I beleue, that beside her perfit readiness, in Latin, Italian, French, & Spanish, she readeth here now at Windsore more Greeke euery day, than some Prebendarie of this Chirch doth read Latin in a whole weeke.1
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Notes
Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, in English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), 219. Ascham had analogous expressions of praise in his letters to Johann Sturm, not meant for public circulation, therefore possibly more reliable in terms of his estimation of Elizabeth’s intellectual abilities. See
The Whole Works of Roger Ascham, Vol. 1. Life, &c., and Letters, ed. J. A. Giles (London: John Russell Smith, 1865), 191, 444.
The letter, transcribed by Rawdon Brown in L’archivio di Venezia. Con riguardo special alla storia inglese (Venezia: Antonelli e Basadonna, 1865), 130–34, is extant in the Venice State Archive, Deliberazioni del Senato, Secreta, Filza 46, dated February 25, 1575.
On this last point, see Giuliana Iannaccaro’s contribution in the present volume. See also Giuliana Iannaccaro and Alessandra Petrina, “To and From the Queen: Modalities of Epistolography in the Correspondence of Elizabeth,” Journal of Early Modern Studies 3 (2014): 69–89. I wish to thank Giuliana for discussing this topic with me, and for many illuminating suggestions.
The whole letter is transcribed in Angelo Solerti, Vita di Torquato Tasso, vol. 2 (Torino, Roma: Loescher, 1895), 204–05.
Giordano Bruno, La cena de le ceneri, in Opere Italiane, eds. Giovanni Aquilecchia and Nuccio Ordine (Torino: UTET; 2002), 477.
See, for instance, Julian Sharman, The Library of Mary Queen of Scots (London: Elliot Stock, 1889), recently updated by John Durkan, “The Library of Mary, Queen of Scots,” in “The Library of Mary, Queen of Scots,” in Michael Lynch, ed., Mary Stewart. Queen in Three Kingdoms (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 71–104;
George F. Warner, The Library of James VI, 1573–83 (Edinburgh: Constable, 1893).
T. A. Birrell, English Monarchs and their Books: From Henry VII to Charles II. The Panizzi Lectures1986 (London: The British Library, 1987).
Birrell, 3. This was only one of a series of sales of duplicates and other acts of dispersal. See James P. Carley, “Henry VIII’s Library and the British Museum Duplicate Sales: A Newly Discovered De-Accession,” in Giles Mandelbrote and Barry Taylor, eds., Libraries within the Library: The Origins of the British Library’s Printed Collections (London: The British Library, 2009), 11–23.
Alessandra Petrina, Machiavelli in the British Isles. Two Early Modern Translations of the Prince (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 21.
Franklin B. Williams, Index of Dedications and Commendatory Verses in English Books before1641 (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1962), 61–62.
Jane A. Lawson, “The Remembrance of the New Year: Books Given to Queen Elizabeth as New Year’s Gifts,” in Peter Beal and Grace Ioppolo, eds., Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing (London: The British Library, 2007), 133–71.
Giovanni Iamartino, “Under Italian Eyes: Petruccio Ubaldini’s Verbal Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I,” in Alessandra Petrina and Laura Tosi, eds., Representations of Elizabeth I in Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 193–209.
James P. Carley, The Books of King Henry VIII and his Wives (London: The British Library, 2004), 13–14.
James P. Carley, “Marks in Books and the Libraries of Henry VIII,” Bibliographical Society of America, Papers 91 (1997): 583–606.
Valerie Wayne, “Some Sad Sentence: Vives’ Instruction of a Christian Woman,” in Margaret Patterson Hannay, ed., Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 1985), 15–29, p. 15.
Carley, Books, 120–21, and Ivy L. Mumford, “Petrarchism in Early Tudor England,” Italian Studies 19 (1964): 56–63, pp. 62–63.
Robert Coogan, “Petrarch’s Latin Prose and the English Renaissance,” Studies in Philology 68 (1971): 270–291, p. 282.
William J. Kennedy, “Petrarchan Poetics,” in Glyn P. Norton, ed., The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, III: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1999), 119–26, p. 121.
Retha M. Warnicke, Women of the English Renaissance and Reformation (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983), 94–97.
Suzanne W. Hull, Chaste Silent & Obedient. English Books for Women1475–1640 (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1982), 5.
William Harrison, The Description of England, ed. Georges Edelen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), 228.
Jonathan Gibson, “The Queen’s Two Hands,” in Alessandra Petrina and Laura Tosi, eds., Representations of Elizabeth in Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 47–65.
Jason Lawrence, “Who the Devil Taught Thee So Much Italian?”. Italian Language Learning and Literary Imitation in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 22.
Michael Wyatt, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England. A Cultural Politics of Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 138–39.
Soko Tomita, A Bibliographical Catalogue of Italian Books Printed in England1558–1603 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).
Maria Grazia Bellorini, “Giovan Battista Castiglione, consigliere di Elisabetta I,” in Sergio Rossi, ed., Contributi dell’istituto di filologia moderna, Serie inglese (Milano: Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 1974), 113–41, pp. 118–19.
See also Mary Augusta Scott, Elizabethan Translations from the Italian (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), lxii.
Leah S. Marcus, “Queen Elizabeth I as Public and Private Poet: Notes toward a New Edition,” in Peter C. Herman, ed., Reading Monarch’s Writing: The Poetry of Henry VIII, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth I, and James VI/I (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), 135–53, p. 143.
On this point, see the classical contribution by Francis Otto Matthiessen, Translation. An Elizabethan Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), and more recently,
Massimiliano Morini, Tudor Translation in Theory and Practice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
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© 2014 Carlo M. Bajetta, Guillaume Coatalen, and Jonathan Gibson
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Petrina, A. (2014). “Perfit readiness”: Elizabeth Learning and Using Italian. In: Bajetta, C.M., Coatalen, G., Gibson, J. (eds) Elizabeth I’s Foreign Correspondence. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137448415_4
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